SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for July
-
NL Seminar-Grapheme-to-Phoneme Models for (Almost) Any Language
Fri, Jul 08, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Aliya Deri, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Grapheme-to-Phoneme Models for (Almost) Any Language
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models are rarely available in low-resource languages, as the creation of training and evaluation data is expensive and time-consuming. We use Wiktionary to obtain more than 650k word-pronunciation pairs in more than 500 languages. We then develop phoneme and language distance metrics based on phonological and linguistic knowledge; applying those, we adapt g2p models for high-resource languages to create models for related low-resource languages. We provide results for models for 229 adapted languages.
Biography: Aliya Deri is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at USC, advised by Professor Kevin Knight.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
-
AI SEMINAR
Fri, Jul 15, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Keith Burghardt,
Talk Title: Understanding the Dynamics of Collective Decisions
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: In a microscopic setting, humans behave in rich and unexpected ways. In a macroscopic setting, however, distinctive patterns of group behavior emerge, leading researchers to search for an underlying mechanism. The aim of this talk is to analyze the macroscopic patterns of collective decisions in order to discern how group opinions form at the microscopic level. To do so, we first explore the mechanisms that underlie competing ideas using agent-based models (ABMs). We find that simple rules can accurately reconstruct the macroscopic patterns we see in data as diverse as elections and juries. Next, we model collective decision-making in online question and answer boards, and find that a simple individual-level model can capture important features of user behavior, and heuristics appears to predict dynamics with increasing accuracy as the number of answers grow, suggesting information overload undermines collective decisions. Overall, these models reveal two important findings. First, our work begins to untangle how human psychology affects macroscopic behavior: stubbornness, in which users increasingly stick to their latest opinion, is a necessary component in our ABMs to produce the macroscopic patterns we see in many diverse datasets. Furthermore, our models suggest limitations of the wisdom of crowds, in which groups produce better decisions than individuals, in common systems may be undermined by influence and information overload.
Biography: Keith Burghardt is a summer research assistant at ISI under Kristina Lerman studying the collective decisions among users of question and answer boards. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Physics at the University of Maryland, and was recently awarded a Doctorate in Philosophy in Physics from the same university under Michelle Girvan and William Rand. His research has focused on applying statistical mechanics, and other physics-based approaches toward understanding collective social phenomena, including work as diverse as jury decisions, epidemics, and online environments.
No Webcast available
Host: Kristina Lerman
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th fl Large CR (Room 689)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
-
NL Seminar-Commonsense Knowledge Base Completion
Fri, Jul 15, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Xiang Li, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Talk Title: Commonsense Knowledge Base Completion
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: We enrich a curated resource of commonsense knowledge by formulating the problem as one of knowledge base completion KBC. Most work in KBC focuses on knowledge bases like Freebase that relate entities drawn from a fixed set. However, the tuples in Concept Net Speer and Havasi define relations between an unbounded set of phrases. We develop neural network models for scoring tuples on arbitrary phrases and evaluate them by their ability to distinguish true held out tuples from false ones. We find strong performance from a bilinear model using a simple additive architecture to model phrases. We manually evaluate our trained models ability to assign quality scores to novel tuples finding that it can propose tuples at the same quality level as medium confidence tuples from Concept Net.
Biography: Xiang Li is asummer intern under the supervision of Prof Kevin Knight and Prof Daniel Marcu. She is also going to be a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Andrew McCallums research group in this coming Fall. She got her BS at the East China Normal University Shanghai China and got her M.S at the University of Chicago. Her research interest mainly focused on natural language processing and machine learning. This work is done when she was in Chicago working with Prof Kevin Gimpel at TTIC Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor -CR # 689; ISI-Marina del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
-
New Perfusion, pH-, and Hypoxia-weighted MRI Approaches for Characterizing the Tumor Microenvironment in Human Glioblastoma
Mon, Jul 18, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Benjamin Ellingson, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Talk Title: New Perfusion, pH-, and Hypoxia-Weighted MRI Approaches for Characterizing the Tumor Microenvironment in Human Glioblastoma
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Interstitial tissue acidosis and hypoxia resulting from abnormal perfusion and metabolism are a hallmark of cancer. This low extracellular pH and O2 has dramatic consequences, as it is directly linked to the degree of malignancy as demonstrated by elevated mutagenesis, increased populations of cancer stem cells, activation of various oncologic pathways, increased tumor invasion, immunosuppression, increased angiogenesis, and resistance to radiation and certain chemotherapies. Relatively limited in vitro, preclinical, and clinical evidence supports the hypothesis that acidosis and hypoxia play important roles in gliomagenesis; however, there remains a critical gap in furthering our understanding of the role of extracellular acidosis and hypoxia in human gliomas and its clinical relevance due to the lack of a robust non-invasive tool for measuring and localizing regions of low pH and oxygen concentration. Additionally, perfusion-weighted MRI techniques such as dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) MRI are routinely used for quantification of tumor perfusion; however, current approaches for clinical DSC-MRI have several limitations including need for adequate post-hoc leakage correction, limited biomarkers for quantifying vascular heterogeneity and hypervascular tumor volume, and limited information about vascular architecture. To overcome these limitations we have developed a new method for obtaining fast, high spatial resolution pH- and hypoxia-weighted molecular MR imaging of human gliomas using multi-echo amine chemical exchange saturation transfer echo planar imaging (CEST-EPI). The technique works by targeted saturating the longitudinal magnetization of amine protons on glutamine (3.0ppm), a major source of fuel for tumor cells, as they undergo pH-dependent chemical exchange with water protons. Using a multi-echo readout of the MR signal during CEST EPI allows for simultaneously obtaining measurements of transverse relaxation rates, which are dependent on oxygenation of the tissue. Lastly, we will describe new approaches for DSC perfusion MRI, including new acquisition strategies, leakage correction algorithms, and methods for quantifying vascular heterogeneity and architecture.
Host: Professor Krishna Nayak
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Whtie
-
USC Stem Cell Seminar: Bill Richards, Amgen
Thu, Jul 21, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bill Richards, Amgen
Talk Title: Unlocking the potential of biology for patients
Abstract: Bill Richards' presentation will introduce you to Amgen and its mission to serve patients, as well as to his experience working in industry. Additionally, he will discuss how findings from human genetics are being used to facilitate drug development at Amgen. Bill Richards chairs the postdoctoral steering committee at Amgen and looks forward to meeting with graduate students and postdocs to discuss the Amgen Postdoctoral Fellowship program.
Biography: Bill Richards has been an employee in the discovery research group at Amgen for 20 years.
Host: USC Stem Cell
More Info: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/usc_stem_cell_seminar_bill_richards_amgen?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V4guYK7Fl04
Location: Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute (ZNI) - 112, Herklotz Seminar Room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
-
NL Seminar-LSTM's for OCR
Fri, Jul 22, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Stephen Rawls and Huaigu Cao , USC/ISI
Talk Title: LSTM's for OCR
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: We present ongoing research into OCR for both machine print and handwriting recognition. We utilize a neural network along with LSTM's to perform OCR directly from pixel intensity. We are exploring a few novel improvements, including using a CNN for feature extraction prior to the LSTM, and combining reinforcement learning into our training to directly optimize word error rate in our test-time decoding procedure, which utilizes a (non-differentiable) language-model based decoding of the LSTM output. Finally, we present the design of the OCR system we used to win a pilot project with the US Census for recognizing handwritten first and last names.
Biography: Stephen Rawls is a research programmer and a PhD student at USC/ISI advised by Dr. Prem Natarajan. He works in the Computer Vision group at ISI on face recognition and OCR, among other projects
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
-
CiSoft Seminar
Mon, Jul 25, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Terry Gardner,
Talk Title: Key technologies used for ultra-deepwater oil production
Series: CiSoft Seminar
Biography: DR. TERRY N. GARDNER is a mechanical engineer. Following a 12-year career in aerospace, he spent over 35 years with Exxon and BP working to advance various aspects of deepwater technology. He led research on deepwater riser VIV; development of a high-current Riser Centralizer System, which was installed in the GoM; development of one of the earliest TLPs, which was installed in the Norwegian North Sea; and numerous riser and production platform innovations for deepwater. He has taught undergraduate engineering at Cornell and Rice and leads tours about oil and gas technology in the Houston Museum of Natural Science. He received a PhD from UCLA and an MS and BME from Cornell in Engineering Mechanics.
In recent years, he developed and has been teaching an overview course on Deepwater Drilling and Production Technology. He has presented various versions of the course in Russia, Israel (Technion), Trinidad, Canada, and many times in the US for SPE and Petroskills.
Host: CiSoft
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 324
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
-
Six Sigma Green Belt for Process ImprovementTue, Jul 26, 2016
DEN@Viterbi, Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract: Course Dates: July 26-28, 2016
Available: On-campus or Online with Interactivity
This program, an introductory course in Six Sigma, will give you a thorough understanding of Six Sigma and its focus on eliminating defects through fundamental process knowledge. Topics covered in addition to DMAIIC and Six Sigma philosophy include basic statistics, statistical process control, process capability, financial implications and root cause analysis.
More Info: https://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial-systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
-
MFD Graduate Seminar
Tue, Jul 26, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vadim Akhmetgareev , TatNIPIneft Research Center
Talk Title: Waterflood Management: How It Can Save Your Money
Biography: Vadim Akhmetgareev is a senior reservoir engineer at the TatNIPIneft research center of Tatneft Oil & Natural Gas Company. Tatneft is a Russian vertically integrated oil and gas company with headquarters in the city of Almetyevsk in the Republic of Tatarstan. It was founded in 1950 and is the fifth largest oil company in Russia. He has more than 12 years of industry experience, including roles in reservoir engineering, waterflooding optimization, EOR/IOR, well stimulation, formation damage control, well completion, project management and Research & Development. Vadim holds a BS in petroleum engineering and a MS in reservoir engineering from the Ufa State Petroleum Technological University (Russia) and a PhD in petroleum engineering from TatNIPIneft (Russia). He is an author of more than 60 patents and has published over 20 technical papers. Vadim is actively involved in the SPE. He has been secretary and chair of the SPE Volga (Russia) section. He is also a 2016 - 2017 SPE Distinguished Lecturer.
Host: Petroleum Engineering Department
More Information: Akhmetgareev 7_26_16.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
-
Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Wed, Jul 27, 2016
DEN@Viterbi, Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract: Course Dates: July 26-28, 2016
Available: On-campus or Online with Interactivity
This program, an introductory course in Six Sigma, will give you a thorough understanding of Six Sigma and its focus on eliminating defects through fundamental process knowledge. Topics covered in addition to DMAIIC and Six Sigma philosophy include basic statistics, statistical process control, process capability, financial implications and root cause analysis.
More Info: https://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial-systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
-
PhD Defense Ding Li
Wed, Jul 27, 2016 @ 03:00 AM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ding Li, PhD Candidate
Talk Title: Energy Optimization of Mobile Applications
Abstract: Energy is a critical resource for mobile devices. Many techniques have been proposed to optimize the energy consumption of mobile devices at the hardware and system levels. However, only optimizations at the hardware and system level are insufficient. Poorly designed applications can still waste the energy of mobile devices even with fully optimized hardware and system support. In my dissertation work, I proposed multiple techniques to help developers to create energy efficient apps. Particularly, my dissertation work addresses three problems in creating energy efficient apps. The first problem in my dissertation is "where is energy consumed." Modern mobile apps are very complex. They may contain more than 500,000 lines of code. Thus, it is important to know which part of the code consumes more energy. To address this problem, I developed a source line level energy measurement technique that can report the energy consumption of mobile apps with a very fine granularity. My technique achieved 91% accuracy during the measurement. The second problem in my dissertation is "what to optimize." Modern mobile apps may use different libraries and invoke thousands of APIs. It is also important to know what kind of libraries and APIs can consume more energy. To address this problem, I conducted an empirical study with 405 Android market apps about how these Android apps consume energy. In this study, I evaluated ten research questions that have motivated my following energy optimization techniques. The third problem is "how to optimize." After knowing where is energy consumed and what to optimize, it is also important to design effective techniques to optimize the energy consumption of mobile apps. To address this problem, I developed two automated techniques. The first one can automatically optimize the display energy for mobile web apps and the second one can optimize HTTP energy for Android apps. My display energy optimization technique reduced the energy by 25% and my HTTP energy optimization technique achieved 15% energy savings. Besides the energy optimization techniques, I also improved the flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency of the string analysis technique, which is very important to my optimization techniques. In summary, my techniques and the empirical evaluation show that program analysis techniques can help developers to understand how energy is consumed in mobile apps and can also help to optimize the energy consumption of mobile apps.
Host: Ding Li
Location: 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Rozan
-
PhD Defense Ding Li
Wed, Jul 27, 2016 @ 03:00 AM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ding Li, PhD Candidate
Talk Title: Energy Optimization of Mobile Applications
Abstract: Energy is a critical resource for mobile devices. Many techniques have been proposed to optimize the energy consumption of mobile devices at the hardware and system levels. However, only optimizations at the hardware and system level are insufficient. Poorly designed applications can still waste the energy of mobile devices even with fully optimized hardware and system support. In my dissertation work, I proposed multiple techniques to help developers to create energy efficient apps. Particularly, my dissertation work addresses three problems in creating energy efficient apps. The first problem in my dissertation is "where is energy consumed." Modern mobile apps are very complex. They may contain more than 500,000 lines of code. Thus, it is important to know which part of the code consumes more energy. To address this problem, I developed a source line level energy measurement technique that can report the energy consumption of mobile apps with a very fine granularity. My technique achieved 91% accuracy during the measurement. The second problem in my dissertation is "what to optimize." Modern mobile apps may use different libraries and invoke thousands of APIs. It is also important to know what kind of libraries and APIs can consume more energy. To address this problem, I conducted an empirical study with 405 Android market apps about how these Android apps consume energy. In this study, I evaluated ten research questions that have motivated my following energy optimization techniques. The third problem is "how to optimize." After knowing where is energy consumed and what to optimize, it is also important to design effective techniques to optimize the energy consumption of mobile apps. To address this problem, I developed two automated techniques. The first one can automatically optimize the display energy for mobile web apps and the second one can optimize HTTP energy for Android apps. My display energy optimization technique reduced the energy by 25% and my HTTP energy optimization technique achieved 15% energy savings. Besides the energy optimization techniques, I also improved the flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency of the string analysis technique, which is very important to my optimization techniques. In summary, my techniques and the empirical evaluation show that program analysis techniques can help developers to understand how energy is consumed in mobile apps and can also help to optimize the energy consumption of mobile apps.
Host: Ding Li
Location: 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Rozan
-
PhD Defense Farshad Kooti
Wed, Jul 27, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Farshad Kooti, PhD Candidate
Talk Title: Predicting and Modeling Human Behavioral Changes Using Digital Traces
Abstract: People are increasingly spending more time online. Finding and understanding the patterns that exist in online behavior is essential for improving user experience. One of the main characteristics of online activity is diurnal, weekly, and monthly patterns, reflecting human circadian rhythms, sleep cycles, as well as work and leisure schedules. These patterns range from mood changes reflected on Twitter at different times of the days to reading stories on news aggregator websites. Using large scale data from multiple online social networks, we uncover temporal patterns that take place at far shorter time scales. Specifically, we demonstrate short-term, within-session behavioral changes, where a session is defined as a period of time during which a person engages continuously with the online social network without a long break. On Twitter, we show that people prefer easier tasks such as retweeting over more complicated tasks such as posting an original tweet later in a session. Also, tweets posted later in a session are shorter and are more likely to contain a spelling mistake. We focus on information consumption on Facebook and show that the people spend less time reading a story as they spend more time in the session. More interestingly, the rate of the change depends on the type of the content and people are more likely to spend time on photos and videos later in the session compared to textual posts. We also found changes in the quality of the content generated on Reddit and found that comments that are posted later in a session get lower scores from other users, receive fewer replies, and have lower readability. All these findings are evidence for short-term behavioral changes in the type of activity that users perform. Moreover, we identify the factors that affect these short-term behavior changes; age of the person being the most significant factor. The trends that we found can be used to predict the online behavior of individuals with much higher accuracy than competitive baselines. E.g., we can predict the length of the activity sessions or the length of breaks on Facebook.
Our observations are compatible with the cognitive depletion theories, suggesting that people's performance drop as they perform sustained activity for a period of time, and verify small scale, laboratory studies conducted by psychologists. We also investigate more general behavioral changes than short-term behavioral changes in the context of consumer behavior, specifically online shopping and iPhone purchases. We show that there is a significant heterogeneity in these large scale datasets and not considering and handling this heterogeneity can result in false findings. We present an approach to test for the false findings using randomization and show in a case of a mistake, how it could be solved.
Host: Farshad Kooti
Location: 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Rozan
-
Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Thu, Jul 28, 2016
DEN@Viterbi, Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract: Course Dates: July 26-28, 2016
Available: On-campus or Online with Interactivity
This program, an introductory course in Six Sigma, will give you a thorough understanding of Six Sigma and its focus on eliminating defects through fundamental process knowledge. Topics covered in addition to DMAIIC and Six Sigma philosophy include basic statistics, statistical process control, process capability, financial implications and root cause analysis.
More Info: https://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial-systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
-
NL Seminar- Let's not be clever: simple pre- and post-processing tricks in machine translation
Fri, Jul 29, 2016 @ 03:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sebastian Mielke, USC/ISI Summer Intern
Talk Title: Let's not be clever: simple pre- and post-processing tricks in machine translation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Today's machine translation system are highly complex and extending them often means leaving highly sophisticated solutions and established algorithms behind. Therefore it is attractive to try to extend the process outside of the translation system: in pre- and post-processing steps. I will show a pre-processing step for helping to translate tweets and a post-processing step that helps "guess" the translations of unknown and thus untranslated words in arbitrary sentences using dictionaries and other resources.
Biography: Sebastian is currently pursuing a CS masters degree in Dresden, Germany with Prof. Heiko Vogler, taking a break from studying to work on low-resource machine translation with Prof. Kevin Knight and Prof. Daniel Marcu as an ISI intern in 2016.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
